1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a pretreatment liquid application drying device, a printing system including the same, and a printing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
The image recording method of the inkjet method has rapidly become widespread, according to advantages such as low noise, low running cost, and the ease of forming color images. However, when images are recorded onto a medium other than exclusive-use paper, there have been initial quality problems in, for example, blurring, density, color tone, show-through, etc., and also problems relevant to the robustness of the image such as water resistance and weather resistance. Therefore, various proposals have been made for solving these problems.
As one means for solving these problems, there is a method of improving the image quality by applying a pretreatment liquid having a function of agglutinating the ink immediately before ink droplets adhere to a sheet that is a recording medium. When the pretreatment liquid is applied, there is a need to dry the sheet before discharging the ink onto the sheet. At this time, when a continuous paper sheet is used as the sheet, cockling may occur, i.e., ripples may be formed in the sheet.
Here, Patent Document 1 discloses a method of preventing cockling. Specifically, during the printing operation, after the ink adheres to the sheet, the sheet is dried, and then a seasoning device is used to spray heated moisture onto the sheet by air blasting, to prevent cockling.
However, the method of Patent Document 1 includes a plurality of processes, and therefore the device is complex and large-scale.
Furthermore, in a device that uses a continuous paper sheet as the sheet, a member for assisting the operation of conveying the sheet (a conveying belt, etc.) may not be provided. In the case of such a device, when a sheet needs to be set to exchange the sheet type or because the device is out of paper, the device needs to be opened to pass the sheet through the device.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-035566